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Essex and the Early Botanists.
IT is sometimes asserted that Essex is a dull county, and offers
but few attractions to the lover of nature. And in compari-
son with many parts of England it will, of course, be admitted
that the scenery is tame and commonplace. Essex can boast of
no hill of a higher elevation than four hundred feet above the
level of the sea; its rivers—the Blackwater, the Chelmer, the
Colne, and the Roding—are, it is true, the reverse of rushing
torrents; while its forests, which in Norman times stretched from
the Thames to the Stour, have to a great extent disappeared.
Except towards Walton and Harwich the coast is remarkably flat,
and bordered with vast stretches of salterns and marshland re-
claimed from the sea. The soil, too, is mostly of the same geo-
logical formation, belonging to that known as the London clay; and
though the chalk crops up here and there in the north of the
county, yet there are no elevated downs, such as give charm and
character to the scenery of Sussex and Hampshire. The county
is in short, mainly an agricultural one, devoted chiefly to wheat
and barley growing, with but little grazing land except in the
marshes, and mapped out into interminable cornfields, divided by
elms and hedgerows.
And yet to the naturalist and archaeologist the county is far
from unattractive. There is a quiet charm about it which those
only who have lived in it can fully appreciate. Colchester alone,
not to mention the ancient parish churches, the ruined priories,
the mediaeval halls and manor-houses, will suffice to render the
county dear to the lover of antiquity. The number of sea-fowl,
which still haunt the estuaries and the salt-marshes, is an unfailing
source of interest to the ornithologist; while to the botanist the
flora of Essex is one of peculiar fascination. This is due not
only to the number of species to which it can lay claim, but
also and chiefly, to the fact of its intimate association with the
early botanists and herbalists.